


here at the end of all things

by coffeeinallcaps



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, BAMF Stiles, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Sexual Content, Unrealistically romantic portrayal of a post-Were War refugee camp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-17
Updated: 2014-05-17
Packaged: 2018-01-25 12:01:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1647941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeeinallcaps/pseuds/coffeeinallcaps
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chris carries the kid in on a rainy afternoon.<br/>“Found him just outside the perimeter,” he says as he lowers the limp body onto one of the mattresses. “I’m not sure he’ll make it.”<br/>Derek takes a look at the kid’s deathly pale skin, the black edges of his blunt fingernails, the long ragged gash running down his side, caked with dried blood and dirt, and for some reason he thinks, <i>he’ll make it, all right</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	here at the end of all things

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt _Sterek in a post-apocalyptic world; one of them is running a survivor’s camp, the other arrives tired and weak. Sparks fly_.

Chris carries the kid in on a rainy afternoon.

“Found him just outside the perimeter,” he says as he lowers the limp body onto one of the mattresses. “I’m not sure he’ll make it.”

Derek takes a look at the kid’s deathly pale skin, the black edges of his blunt fingernails, the long ragged gash running down his side, caked with dried blood and dirt, and for some reason he thinks, _he’ll make it, all right_.

 

* * *

 

Derek takes care of the kid himself. He tells himself it’s because he’s got no other pressing matters to attend to. Chris is keeping an eye on the compound, and Cora is in charge of patrol nowadays. Sometimes Derek thinks they’re fooling themselves by patrolling in the first place; no one out there cares that they’re in here. But it makes the people feel safer and it keeps the more restless ones among them busy, and maybe those are good enough reasons in themselves.

The first time the kid opens his eyes they look wild, more animal than human. Derek’s throat seizes up. The scratch is deep, but it didn’t seem deep enough to have turned the kid. Still, he drops his cloth and wraps his fingers around the grip of his gun instead.

The kid touches his side with both hands, groans when they come away wet with watered-down blood. “What the,” he wheezes. He pushes himself up onto one elbow, and Derek is surprised – impressed – when he doesn’t pass out right away. “Where am I?”

His voice is deep, grainy. Unsteady. Derek relaxes his hand but keeps it on his gun just in case. “Someplace safe,” he says, mostly to see what the kid’s reaction will be.

The kid huffs and continues to eye him warily. His chest is heaving, his pallor growing worse. Drops of sweat are forming on his upper lip. He drags the back of his hand, which is shaking, across his mouth. “You a Were?” he asks roughly.

“Let’s get this cleaned and stitched up before getting into the politics of the situation,” Derek says, picking up the cloth again. He washes it, wrings it out, but when he moves to press it against the wound the kid – despite his fever, despite the fact that he’s struggling to keep his eyes open – snarls and jerks away.

“Suit yourself,” Derek says, amused, and hands the kid the cloth.

He watches with one hand on his gun as the kid scrubs at the wound with ill-contained hostility. Watches the tight set of the kid’s jaw and the narrow, delicate lines of his face and remembers being young and putting up a fight. Remembers the amount of time he spent refusing to trust anyone before finally realizing how much energy it took, energy he couldn’t spare. Not anymore. He watches the kid’s pale face, the sweat glistening on his forehead, and thinks the kid can’t be a kid. Twenty, maybe. Maybe older.

“You got a name?” he asks, even though he knows it’s pointless. The kid raises his eyebrows and continues to scrub. His movements are coarse, angry. Derek watches him carefully, catches the kid right when his mouth goes slack and his eyes roll up. Eases him back onto the mattress. Washes out the cloth again and waits for the kid’s breathing to even out before gently pressing it to the wound.

 

* * *

 

“You’re a Were, right?” the kid mumbles when he comes to again. “I know I’m right. Tell me I’m right.”

Derek nods. “Yeah,” he says. “I am.”

“I knew it.” The kid blinks sluggishly. His eyes, a fiery brown, are glazing over. “Am I— is this a Movement den?”

 _Am I a prisoner._ Derek can hear it loud and clear in the panicked uptick of his heartbeat. “No. We’re neutral,” he says, and the kid pulls a face. “I told you, this is a safe place. We’re neutral.”

“Sure you are,” the kid whispers.

Derek decides to leave it for now. “I told you I’m a wolf,” he says. “Are you going to tell me your name now? Quid pro quo?”

The kid snorts and closes his eyes again. He’s started to shiver uncontrollably. Derek manages to get some water into him before he slips away again.

Deaton stops in briefly to inspect Derek’s stitch job. He hums his approval and presses a bottle of antibiotics into Derek’s palm. “There’s a chance he won’t make it, Derek,” he warns before he leaves, and Derek grits his teeth and thinks, _he’ll make it_.

 

* * *

 

The kid is delirious for three days.

Derek looks after him. He tells himself it’s not because of the kid’s fiery brown eyes or the narrow, delicate lines of his face or the way he keeps trying and failing to push himself up into a sitting position every time he wakes up.

Cora appears in the doorway and says, “Jesus Christ, Derek.”

“You know nothing,” Derek yells after her.

“Pathetic,” she yells back.

The kid shifts and mumbles, “Jon Snow,” but his forehead and cheeks are still burning and he doesn’t say anything else.

Derek thinks that if the kid dies they might have to bury him under a headstone that says _Jon Snow_. He tries to laugh at the thought but his chest feels hollow. He goes for a run. He wants, overwhelmingly, to howl. He shouldn’t, can’t, but his chest hurts and he feels like howling his fucking lungs out.

 

* * *

 

The kid doesn’t die.

 

* * *

 

At some point, he whispers, “I believe you.”

 

* * *

 

The kid’s name is Stiles Stilinski. Derek jots it down in the register and says, “You should take a look at this, see if there’s anyone you care about here. You never know.”

Stiles plucks at his blanket, shakes his head. “Everyone I care about is dead,” he says impassively, and Derek doesn’t argue because there’s a pretty big chance of that.

 

* * *

 

They have a protocol for this sort of thing, although it happens less and less often these days; most of the humans that got caught in the crossfire between the military and the Weres are either bitten, dead, or in government-run refugee camps. Derek puts it in a nutshell for Stiles: isolation until they can be sure the survivor isn’t a threat in any way, then integration into the camp. Weres, obviously, are allowed in. Any Were with reason to abandon the Movement and enough willpower to make it through Deaton’s safety measures against Ferals is no—

Stiles sits up abruptly. “Deaton?” he says. “Alan Deaton?”

His fever broke yesterday, and along with it some of his apathy, but now his eyes have gone shiny again, his cheeks blotched.

“Yes,” Derek says, and Stiles starts scrambling to his feet, his stitches rippling worryingly. Derek stops him, grabs his shoulders, tells him to calm down, but Stiles thrashes in his grip, wild, hits Derek in the face, nails scraping down his cheekbone, breaking the skin, drawing blood.

“I’ve got to see him,” he says hotly, “please, please, let me, I need to—”

 

* * *

 

It’s a small camp. Even if it weren’t, Derek would still know the name and face of every single person within its barbed wire gates. Scott McCall is a young alpha with gentle eyes and the strongest healing touch Derek has ever seen. He’s great with the kids, a reassuring force to humans and Weres alike.

He and Stiles talk animatedly for hours. They cry. They hug. Stiles doesn’t even as much as glance in Derek’s direction when he brings in their dinners and Stiles’ pills.

 

* * *

“So,” Stiles says. “Scotty tells me you more or less run this place.”

Derek shrugs.

“I thought you were, like, a nurse or something.”

“The place runs itself,” Derek says.

Stiles gives him a look that says _you know that’s not what I meant_. “I’d heard of survivor camps, of course,” he says. “Even of the rare few independent ones. Never in a million years did I think I’d stumble into one, much less one run by a Were and an Argent.”

“Just because his family started this war doesn’t mean he had a part in it,” Derek says. A knee-jerk reaction from hearing Chris tell people this over and over again.

Stiles snorts but doesn’t elaborate on his thoughts. He reaches under his shirt, runs his long slender fingers along his stitches, plaintively. “I had a houseplant once,” he says. “It didn’t survive very long.”

Derek waits.

“Just so you know,” Stiles says. “Like, I’m not really the Samwise Gamgee type. I’m more like Pippin and Merry. I provide comic relief and questionable life decisions.”

“Okay,” Derek says slowly.

“Oh my God,” Stiles says. “Frodon’t tell me you haven’t seen _The Lord of the Rings_. Even Scott has seen _The Lord of the Rings_ , and he’s never seen _Star Wars_.”

He’s still touching the stitches, the pads of his fingers smoothing rhythmically back and forth across the thin black thread Derek sewed into his skin. Derek tries to look away but finds he doesn’t want to. “I’ve seen _Star Wars_ ,” he says.

Stiles’ smile is blinding. “Good,” he says. “Anyway, about that houseplant…”

“I get it,” Derek says. “No growing vegetables for you. We’ll find you something else to do. Don’t worry about it.”

He doesn’t tell Stiles that food, for the foreseeable future, isn’t a priority of theirs. This state, if not this entire continent, probably has more food left than people left to eat it. It’s not that he thinks Stiles wouldn’t be able to handle this information; it’s the fact that they don’t really have any priorities that he wants to keep from Stiles. Stiles doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to have the term ‘lackluster survival’ in his vocabulary.

And, sure enough: “I’m a perfect shot,” Stiles says. “You can put me on the hot chick’s team.”

Derek grimaces. “The hot chick is my little sister. Maybe we should put you on breakfast duty instead.”

Stiles grins, then wrinkles his nose. “I’m not really a morning person.”

“You’re useless,” Derek tells him. “I’ve changed my mind, we’re exiling you.”

“I would be a decent sex slave,” Stiles says, waggling his eyebrows. “You could sell me. Or keep me all to yourself.”

Derek’s face feels hot. Stiles is starting to look tired, so Derek pats his knee through the blanket and tells him to get some rest. Stiles rolls his eyes but doesn’t argue.

 

* * *

 

Cora has abused her newly acquired position of power to procure several bags of marshmallows from the pantry – “What’s the pantry?” Stiles wants to know, but Scott shushes him – and authorize a giant campfire. Derek confiscates the marshmallows; there aren’t enough to go around, and he knows better than to foster inequality among the ranks. (“You are zero fun,” Cora tells him.) He allows the campfire, though, and there’s something soothing about the soft crackling of the wood, the warmly lit faces all around him, the buzz of conversation. It almost feels like they’re here by choice instead of because there’s nowhere left to go.

“Just like old times, right?” Cora says. “Camping with Mom and Dad and Laura? Remember?” She bumps their shoulders together.

“Don’t talk to me,” Derek says. “I’m still angry with you.”

Cora snorts. “Like hell you are. You’re a giant marshmallow.”

“Stop using the m-word. We’ll have a riot on our hands soon.”

“You’re severely underestimating your benevolent dictator qualities,” Cora says. “These people adore you. They wish you all the marshmallows in the world. I’m sure of it.”

A few feet away from them, Stiles is whispering something into Scott’s ear. They both laugh, and Derek smiles and looks away, back at the fire.

 

* * *

 

“Holy shit,” Stiles says, pushing his shopping cart down the empty aisles. “This is fucking insane.”

Derek hmm-hmms.

“How come this place hasn’t been raided?” Stiles asks. He picks up a bar of chocolate, blows the dust off it, checks the expiration date and puts it in his cart.

 _Because there’s no one left to raid it_ , Derek thinks, watching Stiles’ fingertips trail along the shelves. “It falls within Deaton’s perimeter,” he says as he adjusts the direction of Stiles’ cart so it doesn’t crash into anything. “Also, wolves don’t shop at Walmart.”

“Was that a joke? You made a joke,” Stiles says. “I can’t believe you just made a joke. We’re wandering around an abandoned, post-apocalyptic Walmart, and you—”

“Let’s go to the book aisle,” Derek says, mostly to shut Stiles up, and Stiles’ whole face lights up when he says, “Holy shit, there are _books_ here?”

 

* * *

 

They don’t keep track of days anymore. An indeterminable amount of time after Chris carried Stiles into the camp, Stiles slips into Derek’s room in the middle of the night. Derek sits up, blankets falling to his waist, and blinks.

“Don’t say anything,” Stiles says in a low voice, pulling the blankets away and hooking his thumbs into the waistband of Derek’s sweatpants. “You’ll ruin the moment.”

Derek doesn’t say anything. He leans back against the wall and watches Stiles draw his soft dick out of his pants, watches his lips close around the tip. Derek curls his hands to fists and watches Stiles nuzzle and mouth at his dick until it’s hard, aching hard and slick and shiny with Stiles’ spit. He gives in to the urge to rest one hand in the curve of Stiles’ shoulder and stroke the hair at the nape of his neck.

Stiles makes a quiet little noise and swallows Derek down, and Derek watches him for a while and then closes his eyes and imagines it’s him going down on Stiles, drawing quiet little noises out of him, Stiles tugging at his hair, moaning, trembling writhing gasping underneath Derek’s mouth.

 

* * *

 

At breakfast the next morning, he catches sight of Stiles and Scott at one of the long tables in the far corner of the hall. Scott smiles; Stiles waves and winks.

“You are such a goner,” Cora says. “It’s disgusting.”

Derek says, “Shut up, Cora,” and carries his bowl of porridge outside to eat it somewhere else.

 

* * *

 

Stiles drops by again a few nights after that. He brings them off together, their dicks moving against each other in his loose grip. When Derek tries to align their mouths Stiles ducks his head, pushes his nose against the underside of Derek’s jaw, sighs, “Oh yeah,” and “feels so good,” and “Derek,” as he rubs the head of Derek’s dick until Derek comes all over his hand. Stiles sits up and straddles Derek’s lap, uses the come to slick his way, draws his own orgasm out of himself with unabashed moans, head tilted back, eyes closed.

He stays for a while afterward, head slotted beneath Derek’s chin as their sweat and come dries on their skins. Derek doesn’t try to kiss him again. Stiles doesn’t kiss Derek either, but before he leaves he whispers, “Sleep well,” into Derek’s ear, and his hot breath brushes down the side of Derek’s face like a caress.

 

* * *

 

Once he’s fully regained his strength, Stiles quickly grows restless. Derek brings him along on trips to the pantry to give him something to do for the time being. The second time, Stiles separates them from the group, corners Derek in the electronics section and goes down on his knees with a mischievous smile.

Derek returns the favor, jerks Stiles off quickly and sinks to the floor to suck Stiles’ orgasm out of him, but Stiles continues to be jittery, unfocused. Absent. When they get back to the main building he pulls Derek to the side and hands him three bottles of lube.

“You are a menace,” Derek says, and Stiles grins and says, “I’m gonna go find Scott. I’ll see you later, yeah?”

 

* * *

 

Stiles is sitting cross-legged in the sun, clawing idly at the dry dirt.

“They bombed the town where I grew up,” he says. “The government. Claimed it was some sort of hub of supernatural activity, even though most of the people who lived there were human. They burned the whole fucking town to the ground. Killed my dad. He was a cop. Town sheriff, actually. He was all I had left after we lost Scott.”

Derek doesn’t say _I’m sorry_. He watches Stiles weigh a small rock in his palm, rub it between his index finger and his thumb.

“I went kind of darkside for a while,” Stiles says, dropping the rock again. “Killed whoever got in my way. If I was a Were my eyes would be blue.” He says, “Maybe you guys shouldn’t give me a gun.”

Derek waits until Stiles looks up, then lets his eyes flash. Stiles doesn’t say anything, just looks at him contemplatively. “I killed my girlfriend,” Derek says. “And my ex.”

Stiles’ eyes go comically wide.

“Holy shit,” he says. “And I thought I had commitment issues.”

“The girlfriend was an accident,” Derek says. “But the ex, she was an Argent. One of the bad ones.”

“Holy shit,” Stiles says again, but his face has relaxed. He gives Derek a small, wry smile.

“I killed my uncle, too,” Derek says. Stiles stops smiling, but Derek isn’t finished yet. “And I almost shot you when you came in,” he continues. “You were acting suspicious. I thought maybe you’d been turned.”

Stiles barks out a joyless laugh. “No, he wasn’t going to turn me.”

Derek’s mind goes quiet. “What?” he says.

Stiles stares at him. “The Were who did this,” he says, nodding down to where the scar sits underneath his shirt, a long ragged welt of red and white. “He wasn’t feral, and he wasn’t going in for the kill. Not yet anyway. It’s a single scratch, right? I thought he was going to eviscerate me, but he said he just wanted to have some fun. I told him his breath smelled and he shouldn’t play with his food and then I unloaded all my wolfsbane bullets into his stomach and ran until I passed out.”

Derek wills his fingers to uncurl. They do so, one by one. “Jesus, Stiles,” he says, just to say something. To let Stiles know he’s listening.

Stiles shrugs, buries the tips of his fingers in the dry dirt again. “Shit happens,” he says. “I’m mostly pissed off about losing all my stuff,” and Derek wants to kiss him like never before, wants to climb into his lap and push him back onto the ground and fuck him, no; make love to him. Wants to crawl under his skin and stay there until the end of time.

“Yeah,” he says, pulling at a blade of grass. “Shit happens, all right.”

Stiles smiles up at him, squinting against the sun.

 

* * *

 

“I don’t know about this,” Chris says. “The kid is smart, sure, but he’s reckless. He started a fight yesterday. I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“He punched Jackson Whittemore in the face. I wouldn’t call that starting a fight as much as doing us all a favor,” Cora says. “He just needs something to keep him busy, that’s all. Being stuck here on the compound is driving him insane. I want him on my team. We had four Feral sightings this past week alone. The ash line is fallible, and I’d rather check it with someone who knows how to use a gun and won’t hesitate to pull the trigger.”

Deaton says, “Derek?”

Derek clears his throat.

“Derek is biased. He shouldn’t have a say in this matter,” Cora cuts in sharply, and as much as Derek hates to admit it, she’s right.

 

* * *

 

Sex with Stiles is intense and overwhelming. Derek can’t get enough of it, which is a good thing because Stiles seems insatiable.

It feels like they’ve been at it for hours, and possibly they have. They’ve both come twice and there’s not enough air in the room and Derek’s skin is on fire and they’re a sticky mess of sweat and come, but he can’t stop touching Stiles, can’t stop running his fingers along the ridges of his clavicles and his ribs, can’t stop pressing his mouth to the insides of his thighs and the thin line of hair trailing down from his navel.

“I can’t,” Stiles gasps from above when Derek licks a teasing circle around the head of his dick, “no more, Derek, I can’t,” and Derek stifles a smile in the crease of Stiles’ hip before letting Stiles’ hands sink into his hair and guide him up again.

 

* * *

 

Stiles is granted permission to join Cora’s patrol group, and life falls into a new pattern. Derek does repairs around the compound, talks to people, keeps everything running smoothly. Stiles spends his days walking the perimeter, sparring with Chris, learning from Deaton. He gains muscle and develops a tan. His hair grows shaggy, and Scott cuts it, and it looks like shit for a week or two.

They don’t see each other much during the day. At meetings Stiles is loud and quick-tempered, challenging everyone including Derek. Sometimes he walks out. Derek starts to pick the seat with a view of the window so he can see Stiles’ back as he paces back and forth in front of the main building, or sits on the porch with his head bent and his hands in his lap.

 

* * *

 

Stiles continues to stop by Derek’s room almost every evening. He goes back to the hut he shares with Scott right before sunrise. He kisses Derek’s cheek, his temple, the length of his dick, the space between his shoulder blades, but never his mouth.

He often asks Derek to fuck him extra hard on the nights when they’ve had a disagreement at the meeting, and often Derek does. Stiles cranes his neck back and reaches backward to dig his fingers into Derek’s thigh, groans, “I get so horny when you’re mean to me in public,” and Derek thrusts into him again and thinks, _stay_.

 

* * *

 

“Kiss me,” Stiles demands, finally, in a whisper, and Derek does.

 

* * *

 

Derek knows better than to be surprised the day the patrol group returns with a profusely bleeding kid, propped up between a pissed-off looking Cora and an ashen-colored Stiles.

“Ran into a Feral,” Cora says tersely. “Took us by surprise. Slashed up Jared real good and knocked Stiles into a tree before we could take her down.”

“It’s just a concussion,” Stiles manages before he throws up all over Derek’s shoes and passes out.

 

* * *

 

It really is just a concussion. Deaton prescribes bed rest in a dark room and cold compresses for the headache. “Seems you’ve found yourself quite a handful,” he says meaningfully, nodding at Stiles before leaving the room. Derek shades all the windows and stuffs a pillow against the crack under the door, briefly pressing his forehead to the wood.

“I’m going to kill Cora,” he tells himself.

“Don’t kill Cora,” Stiles whispers from the bed. “I like Cora.”

“She’s irresponsible, and too stubborn for her own good.”

“She’s too stubborn for _your_ good,” Stiles corrects him. “Also, I was under the impression that both of those were qualities you liked in people.”

“You’re not people,” Derek says. “And I only like it when it’s not getting you almost killed.”

“If it weren’t for my habit of almost getting myself killed I would never have gotten here in the first place,” Stiles points out.

Derek can’t argue with that, so he kneels beside the bed and presses the cold compress to Stiles’ bruised temple. Stiles huffs and shudders, then relaxes. “Feels nice,” he mumbles. He cracks one eye open. “Hey, if you need to take your aggression out on something, I bet I could still get it up. Just make sure not to jostle my head.”

“You’re a menace,” Derek tells him, and he means it.

Stiles closes his eyes. “I know.” It sounds like _I’m sorry_.

“There’s no way I can get you to reconsider breakfast duty, is there?” Derek says.

Stiles makes a noise. “Mornings.”

Derek sighs.

Stiles opens one eye again. “You know, I think you should be more grateful,” he says. “I mean, you can’t deny the fact that I totally spice up your life. Keep you on your toes.”

“Our country is at war,” Derek tells him. “We’re living in a refugee camp. I don’t think I need to be kept on my toes.”

“Your negative outlook on life is making my head hurt.”

“Your own stupidity is the reason your head hurts,” Derek says.

Stiles grunts. “I can’t believe I ever thought you were a nurse. Your bedside manner is appalling.”

“And yet you keep coming back for more,” Derek says. He takes the cold compress away and pushes the wet hair back from Stiles’ forehead. Stiles exhales and tips his head toward him, smiling weakly. His eyes are closed again. He reaches for Derek’s other hand, and their fingers entwine in the dark.

**Author's Note:**

> Come hang out with me [on Tumblr](http://coffeeinallcaps.tumblr.com).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Spark&Teeth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5811859) by [ShyAudacity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShyAudacity/pseuds/ShyAudacity)




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